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Ben's Rage
Lost in the rain on the Los Quetzales TrailBoquete
Boquete was a lot larger and more touristy than the previous mountain towns we had visited, and you could almost measure the proximity to Costa Rica by the number of American expats around! It was also rated one of the top 5 places to retire by Fortune Magazine... with a lot of backpackers too this made for a mixed bunch. We managed to find a place to stay for $9.95 a night so we were very chuffed (an average budget room in Panama is between $25 and $35) - and stayed for 5 days. Possibly a little too long in a town with not much to do and with a lot of rain! But we made the most of our time by doing a bit of walking, and saving even more money by cooking most of our meals... Panama has been a bit of a shock to our budget after the relative cheapness of Mexico and Guatemala. Our hostel had the added quirk of a talking parrot, who rather surprised Ben when he was greeted with a cheery "hola" and there was no one to be seen!
Boquete forms one end of the famous Los Quetzales trail through
the western slopes of Volcan Baru. The trail is particularly famous for (surprise surprise) sightings of the Quetzal bird, an elusive species native to the cloud forests of Central America. Completing the whole trail takes about 5-8 hours, but involves a 3 and a half hour bus ride back to Boquete around the base of the volcano, so we decided to walk halfway and then walk back. We got up early, got a taxi to the trailhead, desperately hoping the torrential rain would stop! It didn't, but us crazy fools decided to start walking anyway. We were apparently too early for the ranger, which turned out to be a double edged sword. On the one hand, we got away without paying the $3 park entry fee, but on the other hand, we had no ranger or map to tell us which way to go. So after 3 attempts to find the right path (remember it was absolutely weeing it down at the same time), we eventually began the trail. We were both a little frustrated at this point, and Ben even stabbed a log with his penknife in exasperation!(this sounds odd, but at the time was actually very funny, and
not something he does reguarly, honest!) Soon enough however, the rain started to ease off, and then in a clearing between trees, Ben even spotted a Quetzal. Birdwatchers around the world will be crying with envy! (seriously, people do come to Panama for the sole reason to spot a Quetzal, and a lot of people go away dissapointed!) So our perseverence paid off in the end and the sun even came out as we walked back to Boquete.
We also happened to be in Boquete when the town was celebrating their 200th anniversary (we think). It involved lots of dancing, ranging from traditional dances to young girls in luminous outfits dancing to hip hop. There were also loads of people on very beautiful horses everywhere you went, we never figured out what exactly they were doing! The highlight of the day involved a very tall bamboo pole with a flag and a box on top. Local guys (we didn't spot a single gringo attempting it!) took turns to try and shimmy up the pole to unlock the box. There were a lot of techniques and attempts but eventually one guy, with a lot of encouraging from the crowd and
his fellow shimmiers, managed it, and collected his prize surrounded by a huge crowd of enamoured kids.
Bocas del Toro
After 5 days (possibly a little too long, but our acccomodation being so cheap we hung on in there!) in Boquete we headed back across Panama to Bocas del Toro, for the second time. This time, however, we had a different mission in hand - we were going to save the turtles! We had arranged a week volunteering for a turtle conservation project on Bastimentos Island. The week was off to a bumpy start when we turned up at the local ANAM office (Panama's equivalent of the UK's national park services) at the arranged time and were told to come back to someone's house that evening at 7. Well, we thought, not a great start, maybe we got this all wrong! So we had a vegeburger (one of four separate visits to the same greasy spoon cafe over our many trips to Bocas- well they had vegeburgers!!), a happy hour Margarita (Bocas Town is Panama's “Backpacker Party Central”) and found our way to the right house at 7pm. Our doubts were dispelled as everything went to plan and
we arranged everything for the next morning. We were headed by boat to Playa Larga (Long Beach), a remote beach on Isla Bastimentos, and a favoured nesting ground of endangered Leatherback, Hawksbill, and later on in the year, Green Turtles. The description we had been given of our home for the next week was that it was “little more than a wooden hut on the beach”. So that's no electricity, no showers, and no vegeburgers for the next 7 days! So we rushed back to the hotel room for a final shower (including genuine backpacker experience of leaking toilet/shower combination all over the bathroom floor) and a final splurge of watching back to back episodes of subtitled Friends episodes on the TV in the room! So much for Backpacker Party Central!
Turtle time!
Bright and early next morning we caught the boat, along with our food supplies for the week, to Playa Larga. The sun was out, the sea was clear, the coconut palms were swaying in the breeze and it was incredibly beautiful. We also had more facilities than we were expecting, including a flushing toilet and a shower...well the shower involved dropping buckets of water on
your head, and the toilet involved chucking sea water into the bowl to flush!
Our main tasks during our time at Playa Larga were nocturnal, and involved us pairing up with a paid or non paying volunteer (we were at the bottom of the rung - paying!) and patrolling the beach looking for nesting turtles. We did shifts of 4ish hours, which could be longer if we found a turtle. We walked twice up and down the entire beach, which was a total of 12kms, no mean feat in the middle of the night when you had just had 3 hours sleep (plus we were walking in sand, which is tricky at the best of times!). However it was worth every painstaking, sinking, soggy wet step, as coming across a huge Leatherback Turtle huffing and puffing her way up the beach is an experience we will never forget.
More often than not, we would find a turtle once she had already laid her eggs, and was camouflaging the nest. Some turtles would spend ages doing this, throwing sand all over the place over a large area to disguise the nest from predators. This is when we would measure the
turtle, which involved straddling it with one leg either side and measuring the length and width of the shell. This sounds a lot easier than it was, imagine a 1.5 by 1m (just the shell) turtle trying to move and dig sand with you on top trying to not fall on top of them! It would generally (for me) end up with me being either covered in sand from head to toe, or being repeatedly smacked round the legs by VERY strong front and back flippers!!
However, if we did manage to catch the turtle before she laid her eggs, there was a lot more work to do. Firstly we had to check that the turtle was tagged, and if not, tag her back flippers with a metal ID tag. If we did this, we then had to name the turtle as well. We also had to watch out for where the nest was being made, if it was too close to the sea there would be a risk of the eggs getting too salty wet, or if it was too near the jungle and undergrowth there was a different risk from tree roots getting into the nest. If
the nest was in a bad place we would relocate the eggs, so one of us would lie in the sand with a plastic bag and plastic gloves and catch the eggs as they fell into the nest. Turtles can lay over 100 eggs so this was a little time consuming! The other person would dig a new nest in a safer place, as similar in design to the original as possible, and then we would count the eggs into the new nest. It was a little sad to watch the turtles going to so much trouble camouflaging a nest with no eggs in, but at the same time, the eggs were safe! We would then tie ribbons to trees to triangulate the nest so we knew where it was to monitor the hatchlings in 2 months time. By this point, Mum turtle would be heaving herself, exhausted, back into the sea, job done!
Most of the turtles we saw at Playa Larga were Leatherbacks, but I was lucky enough on my first night to see a Hawksbill, which was very cute and much smaller. Unfortunately Hawksbills are also much more shy than Leatherbacks so we had to keep our
distance and watch in the dark from afar!
During the day at Playa Larga we caught up on sleep, cooked, ate, watched the many lizards chasing each other around, read, swam, snorkeled and played cards.. a hard life! Although we did have a few little jobs to do, such as cleaning, topping up water buckets for washing up and flushing the loo, digging a hole for a compost bin and attempting to burn very soggy paper rubbish. Trying to avoid getting bitten by the sandflies was my hardest job!! The recent rain (luckily we hardly had any while we were at the beach!) had broken the banks of the freshwater lagoon that filled the well, so we had no water for showers most of the time we were at the beach. So we made do with washing in the lagoon itself, which was a lot of fun, especially coming off patrol at nighttime, going to the lagoon to wash all the sand off and being very aware of the Caimans swimming potentially very close!
Staying at Playa Larga was a great experience, living the “Robinson Crusoe” lifestyle, and of course seeing and working with the turtles (which made
Red Frog Beach
Our friends - 25c for this! the lack of washing and being permanently covered with sand and sandflies worth every minute - oh and the fact it was paradise!!) We were there with an Israeli girl named Adi, a local lad called Ascelio, and for half of the week a Spanish girl named Julia who was replaced halfway through by an English girl called Jenny. We all got to know each other very well living so closely!
One day we walked around the island to Old Bank, the largest town on Bastimentos Island and where we had stayed previously. The walk there was hot, sweaty and very long, but very beautiful, with more wild beaches, birds and lots of frogs. Once there we treated ourselves to a lunch of pizza and banana milkshakes, which after a week of rice and pasta was well deserved! On the way we passed Red Frog Beach, the most touristy of the beaches on the Island, and walked smack bang into Backpacker Land, with beach bar, music, happy hour beers and M&M's for sale, well of course who can resist M&M's! So we had a little stop here and met some local kids who had frogs wrapped up in leaves
and were charging $1 for a photo. However Adi, who we were walking with, found one little entrepreneur who was only charging 25 cents, bargain! We also walked up a rather large hill to a little place owned by a Scottish Argentinian couple who made their own chocolate truffles and brownies - so of course after the walk we had to indulge! Unfortunately we left getting back a bit late and had to pay rather a lot to get a boat back to Playa Larga in a desperate race to beat the sunset...we made it!
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John
non-member comment
Wow. This looks amazing! I dream of places like this.